Your Right to Know

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama moved yesterday to keep a deal with Iran on its nuclear
program from being undermined, as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said lawmakers would weigh
whether new sanctions are needed.

“We cannot close the door on diplomacy,” Obama said during a speech in San Francisco. “Tough
talk and bluster may be the easy thing to do politically,” though it is not right for national
security, he said. The agreement reached over the weekend will place the first real constraints on
Iran’s nuclear program in a decade, he said.

Reid said yesterday that senators would “take a look at this to see if we need stronger
sanctions” after they return from their Thanksgiving holiday break on Dec. 9.

Obama’s aides have been calling lawmakers, urging them to hold off passing more sanctions
against Iran.

The agreement by the United States and other world powers with Iran provides a foreign-policy
achievement for a president whose standing has been damaged by the flawed rollout of his
health-care law.

It averts the risk of another U.S. military action in the Middle East and represents a
breakthrough in relations between the U.S. and Iran 34 years after the Islamic revolution broke
ties.

“If we need work on this — if we need stronger sanctions — I am sure that we will do that,” Reid
said on the
Diane Rehm Show, which airs on NPR.

Menendez, D-N.J., said he expected any legislation would provide a six-month window, the time
span of the interim agreement, before taking effect.

“We’re going to come up with a new round of sanctions that really defines the endgame,” Sen.
Lindsay Graham, a South Carolina Republican who is critical of the accord, said yesterday on CNN. “
The endgame is to dismantle. The endgame should stop enrichments.”

Polls taken before the deal was announced suggest the framework fits the mood of a U.S. public
weary of wars in the Middle East after military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Americans by 64 percent to 30 percent said in an ABC-Washington Post poll taken Nov. 14-17 that
they would support lifting some economic sanctions on Iran in return for restrictions on the
country’s nuclear program that made it harder to develop weapons. The public backed such a deal
even though 61 percent said they were “not confident” it would prevent Iran from developing nuclear
weapons.